Why did production on GENERATIONS start so soon after TNG?

This is the one thing that really puzzled me about the making of this flick. I think many would agree had this film been given more time to breathe after the show ended we might have have had a more refined version of this flick. It also seems like a mistake that Moore and Braga were working on both the finale and the film script simultaneously (it's truly a miracle that "All Good Things..." turned out as great as it did, more impressive a feature than the actual film). What was behind the decision to work on this so soon after the show? Was it Paramount's idea of trying to strike while the iron was still hot?

 

As I remember, they wanted to do it while they still had the standing sets. Production on Voyager was set to start after GEN wrapped, so the TNG sets would have to be taken down to make room for the new VOY sets.

I may be remembering wrong, but that's how I remember it.

 

I almost forgot of VOY, but that makes a lot of sense. And of course Paramount wanted to have UPN debut with a new Trek show, so Berman wasn't going to be able get the time for either production to breathe. So much pressure on Trek in 94.

 

And in Hollywood, it's always about getting the money as fast as you can.

 

I believe that's true of any business, not just Hollywood.

 

$

 

You'd think even just going for the money, they'd know that putting some distance between the show and the debut film would build more hype and draw more people in theaters. In the end, it only turned out to be marginally more successful than THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY.

Or as they say in the flick: "That's a pretty big margin of error", "TOO BIG".

 

^I seem to recall posts about they waited too long between Star Trek (2009) and STID, So it looks like they can't win either not quick enough or too quick.

 

Four years is quite a bit longer than six months.

The thing that got me was this was the big crossover? What should've been a bang was a whimper.

 

Four years certainly didn't help NEMESIS. Two to three years is really the best gap between productions. It's not too soon or too long. GENERATIONS needed the time to really get things right, and as Bill said, should have been a bang. What might have also helped was ending TNG after six seasons instead of seven. The writers today acknowledge that by the seventh season they were pretty much running out of ideas.

 

maybe they should've waited a couple of years - build abit of anticipation for TNG on the big screen, give TNG cast/crew a break to come up with a better story, got Meyer or Nimoy to direct the film (both had directed time travel movies- Nimoy was offered directing and appearing in the existing Generations but turned it down due to the script and lack of time), & 1996 was the 30th ann - ideal time for a crossover film with the 2 casts (Paramount were dead set on doing the crossover film)

[LEFT]It could have been an epic 2 hour crossover movie like Avengers/XMen DOFP (more so than GEN turned out) ...and like Avengers there would’ve been build up to it with all the cameos/guest appearances in TNG/Trek VI - a real event - Star Trek VII/TNG The Motion Picture

of course that would've been a 5 year gap in the movie series which was abit long[/LEFT]

 

Script aside, I think it was a good move to go ahead and start shooting the first TNG movie right after the series finale.

 

94 was practically billed as a "year of Trek" by the Paramount marketing machine. TNG ended with high ratings, a new series on the way on a new network in the fall, AND a movie by Christmas. If the internet had been bigger then they'd have had something all over that, too.

 

I don't. I think part of the reason TMP was successful was because people had an opportunity to "miss" the characters. There was no "absence makes the heart grow fonder" with the TNG gang. Not to mention that there were a hundred more episodes and many were available on VHS and in syndication.

Of course, it could have been completely different if Generations hadn't been such a let down. But I'm not sure.

I think those years should be the first lesson in How Not to Manage a Franchise Property 101.

 

In part, there was only a seventh season of TNG because the studio wanted a two year gap between ST6 and TNG: The Movie, but they didn't want all the (cast/crew/set) problems which came with a year's break of TNG production between the last season and the movie.
The other side of it was the decision that, rather than DS9 being TNG's successor, launched in parallel, it would be a sister series, with TNG being replaced by a fourth starship-based series that would take its place alongside DS9.

Worth remembering that, after the initial two year break, the original Planet of the Apes movie franchise came out at yearly intervals. And in 1979 or 82, that was vaguely what some Trek fans hoped would happen with the Trek movies.

 

I don't think that making fans wait for a TNG movie would have had the same effect as the gap between TOS and TMP. It's possible, though I have no evidence, that there was concern that fans would lose interest in the TNG cast since there would be two series on the air.

Overall, I like GEN. I don't care for the way they killed Kirk, but hey. Whatcha gonna do?

 

Those were heady days. When Battle for... came out in '73, you could go to theaters and see all 5 films in Ape-0-Rama marathons on weekend matinees.

 

Those Apes sequels were also done on the cheap and made at a time when sequels were frowned upon. To make Trek films in that fashion, Paramount would have had to probably produce them like glorified TV episodes with lesser effects. That wasn't going to happen, not after THE GODFATHER, PART II changed how everyone looks at sequels and how STAR WARS made sci-fi a very popular genre in film.

 

It definitely seems clear to me that this was the answer.

VOY was going to be using TNG's floor-plan for their new sets (so it matched the lighting rigs etc), and production was moving forward very quickly. I suspect that Berman and co simply had no choice. TNG the movie had to go in front of the cameras as quickly as possible, so that they could scratch the sets, and start building Voyager's.

DS9 was unaffected, because their sets stood on a completely different soundstage.

An interesting fact that often gets lost in the shuffle of these discussions: while people remember that the TNG portions of the movie were shot a mere matter of weeks after TNG the series wrapped, the movie in fact actually overlapped the production of "All Good Things"... but it was all the Kirk/Scotty/Chekov/Enterprise-B material, which was all being shot at the same time as TNG's finale.

 

In retrospect, it might have been better had they waited and used new sets. As it is, the TV sets didn't stand up to scrutiny on the theatre screen, resulting in everything on board the Enterprise D being so damn dark. The ship had obviously been refitted (changes to the bridge, new stellar cartography) so they could get away with other changes to the interior. Of course, they wouldn't want to sink so much money on new sets since the plan was to destroy the D anyway, but they could get around this by not destroying the D.